A layer on of hands. Rossetti. Metrical style. His laying on of hands was more potent; a transmitted heat has gone abroad through the ministry of his disciples, who practise as he preached, and sometimes transcend both his preaching and his practice. All the same, the originator of a force is greater than others who add four-fold to its momentum. They are never so manifestly his pupils as when they are "scarifying" and "sounding and exploring" him, "reporting where they touch bottom and where not," on ground of their own, but with a pleasant mockery of the master's word and wont. There was a semblance between the poets Emerson and Rossetti, first, in the small amount of their lyrical work, and again in the positive influence which each exerted upon his pupils. In quality the Concord seer, and the English poet who was at once the most spiritual and sensuous of his own school, were wholly unlike. Rossetti was touched with white fire, but dreamed of souls that meet and glow when disembodied. The spirits of his beatified thrill with human passion. Our seer brought something of heaven to earth, while Rossetti yearned to carry life through death to heaven. The technical features of Emerson's verse correspond to our idea of its meaning. In fact, his view of personal culture also applied to his metrical style. Manners are not to be directly cultivated. That is frivolous; leave it to children. . . . We must look at the mark, not at the arrow, and perhaps the best rule is Lord Bacon's, - that to attain good forms one only needs not to despise them." Delicate and adroit artisans, in whose eyes poetry is solely a piece of design, may find the awkwardness of Emerson's verse a bar to right comprehension of its frequent beauty and universal purpose. I am not sure but one must be of the poet's own country and breeding to look SLIGHT CONSTRUCTIVE FACULTY. 159 quite down his vistas and by-paths: for every American has something of Emerson in him, and the secret of the land was in the poet, the same Americanism that Whitman sees in the farmer, the deck-hand, the snag-toothed hostler, atoning with its humanities for their sins past and present, as for the sins of Harte's gamblers and diggers of the gulch. It may be, too, that other conditions are needed to open the ear to the melody, and to shut out the discords, of Emerson's song. The melody is there, and though the range be Native narrow, is various within itself. The charm is that of new-world and native wood-notes wild. Not seldom a lyrical phrase is the more taking for its halt, helped out, like the poet's own speech, by the half-stammer and pause that were wont to precede the rarest or weightiest word of all. wood-notes wild. sense of Among the followers of any art there are those Deficient whose compositions are effective in the mass, their proportion. treatment broad, the beauty pervasive; again, those who with small constructive feeling are rich in detail, and whose work is interspersed with fine and original touches; lastly, the complete artists, in whom, however vivid their originality and great their special beauties, the general design is always kept in hand. Emerson never felt the strength of proportion that compels the races to whom art is a religion and a law. He has given many a pang to lovers of the beautiful, who have endured his irreverence by allowing for his supposed disabilities. He satisfied his conscience in the same easy way, declaring that he was from his "very incapacity of mechanical writing" a "chartered libertine." But his speech bewrayeth him. Who sounds one perfect chord can sound again. His greater efforts in verse, as in prose, show that he chose to deprecate the constructive faculty lest it might limit A noncon formist. Miss Fuller on his synthesis. Unique lyrics and notable sayings. his ease and freedom. And his instinct of personality, not without a pride of its own, made him a nonconformist. We are told of his mode of preparing an essay, — of the slow-growing medley of thoughts on a topic, at last brought out and strung at random, like a child's variegated beads. But I do not find that his best essays read backward as well as forward; I suspect an art beneath their loose arrangement, and I see at times the proof of continuous heat. His early critic declared that he had not "written one good work, if such a work be one where the whole commands more attention than the parts." But again we see that she too rarely qualified her oracles. 66 At that time he had written poems of which the whole and the parts were at least justly related masterpieces, lyrical masterpieces, of course, not epic or dramatic; of such were the "Threnody" and "Woodnotes," to which was afterward added the May-Day." Breadth and proportion, in a less degree, mark "The Problem," "Monadnock," "Merlin," and a few other pieces. But working similarly he falls short in the labored dithyrambic, "Initial, Dæmonic, and Celestial Love." He was formal enough in youth, before he struck out for himself, and at the age of eleven, judging from his practice-work, was as precocious as Bryant or Poe. But he soon gave up construction, putting a trademark upon his verse, and trusting that freedom would lead to something new. So many precious sayings enrich his more sustained poems as to make us include him at times with the complete artists. Certainly, both in these and in the unique bits so characteristic that they are the poet himself, "Terminus," "Character," "Manners," "Nature,” etc., -he ranks with the foremost of the second class, poets eminent for special graces, values, sudden meteors of thought. In that - 'SAYINGS GRAVED IN GOLD. gift for "saying things," so notable in Pope and Tennyson, he is the chief of American poets. From what other bard have so many original lines and phrases passed into literature, — inscriptions that do not wear out, graven in bright and standard gold? It is worth. while, for the mere effect, to group some of them together, and especially those which, appearing in his first book forty years ago, long since became a constituent part of our literary thought and expression: "'T is the law of bush and stone, Each can only take his own." "The thoughts that he shall think "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? |